


The Zemnian Witch of the Wood

by moonmoonandthemorrigan



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Beau is still emotionally constipated and we love her anyway, Empire Siblings - Freeform, Gen, Una Lives
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-03
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:15:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27443995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonmoonandthemorrigan/pseuds/moonmoonandthemorrigan
Summary: There are two things that Zemnian Children know.(An Una Ermendrud Survives AU)
Relationships: Beauregard Lionett & Caleb Widogast
Comments: 2
Kudos: 51





	1. Prologue: Folk tales and Ancient Sins

There were two things that the children of Blumenthal knew. The first was never to go into the wood because in the wood there was a witch and a million other things that could take them away from their families. The second was that the wood had grown to encompass three farmhouses that no one older liked to think about, much less talk about. They were told that the ghosts of wizards and monsters haunted that forest. That once, near Barren's Eve many years ago, there had been three more families that in a little town that barely merited a mention since Felderwin had become a better breadbasket than anyone would have dreamed. That one night shadows from the darkness of the Empire's past, whether it be the threat of shadowy forces of the Kryn or some angry ghosts of their Zemnian forefathers the story varied from telling to telling, came and consumed these three families.  
The first they said, was bathed in blood because of their faith. Small trinkets of the house, feathers and swirls of the Wildmother and the Raven Queen, had been shattered upon the ground when they'd investigated the quiet house. The whispers of their allegiance to unapproved gods issued and combined into the regions ever strengthening trust in the Dawnfather and the hidden worries of the family's friends.  
The second family had choked upon their greed. They'd been millers and that year the cost of grinding the corn and wheat and barley into flour had tripled in service to their arrogance and their covetousness. When they had been found around the table dead, no one thought to tell their daughter far away at school. We do not speak ill of the dead, the elders of the town had said, but there will be more food and better harvests when the millers do not charge half a year's salary for bread. Remember the second family little children and give generously and live frugally.  
The third family... Well, the third family was the worst... They had been consumed by fire and madness that only magic could have perpetrated. The walls had gone up too fast and too furiously to have been anything else, and that only a small clearing of the forest had gone with the house and the bodies within it had been a miracle beyond what could have ever been assumed. Remember the price of magic is too high, sanity and family were far more important than the spark that might come from your fingers.  
The Elders would remember, but would never share, the way they'd carried the son of the last family away from the building—unresponsive, sobbing, and screaming under the small film of ash across his face—to be healed far far away from Blumenthal. They knew better than to tempt the fates of power more mysterious and miserable than the gods over the fate of one poor boy from a family of poor farmers. But never again would they encourage the spark of magic within their town in hopes that their own ambition would give them some reflected consideration. Never again.  
If any child went wandering into the wood, ghosts would tear them limb from limb and events would unfold again and again and spread like wildfire to their own families. And they could not afford to lose another family that way.  
If the ghosts didn't get them, the witch would. Now there were older stories--older than the elders who had heard stories of die Hexen, the witches, from their own elders--about witches in the woods around Blumenthal. How they would take the heart, the eyes, and the brains of little children who decided to go wandering at night when sacrifice was afoot. But there were also rumors of a new witch who'd taken residence there. No hero had seen her, or killed her, but among the womenfolk and the lonely children there was the rumor that if you wanted protection from you husband or your enemies--or love potions or poultices that would, say, take away an unwanted child before they had the chance to quicken in the womb, or even just a person to talk to--you'd go to the middle of the forest, far past the three houses and their angry ghosts to the cottage with windows for walls. There you would find your answer or your doom.   
The story goes that the Witch was an old widow: her back hunched, wrists and fingers wizened into bird claws that slashed out at anything that could be considered a threat. That she was blind and had an evil apparition of a cat that stared into the depths of your soul and could determine the truth. Some stories had her husband, a good man and a better father, and her son both going off to war and dying in an ill-fated battle against the Kryn. Others had her murder her husband for the wretched evil that he had wrought upon her. Still others said she was a ghost driven mad by her death and the death of her families that awful awful Barren's Eve. Some say that you can still hear her wail over the broken bones of her burnt home when the wind is loud and the night is quiet.   
And the Elders let the rumor stand and her real name, her real life forgotten. After all, they had all died over twenty years ago—on the same wretched night—and Blumenthal had a long memory. But the thing about long memories are that often littered with the debris of some kind of misinformation. 


	2. Chapter one: Beauregard Lionette and the End of a No Good Very Bad Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which, Beau gets lost in the wood.

Beau wasn't sure quite how this had happened. One minute she was punching a monster in the fucking face and tackling Caleb out of whatever weird shit was happening with that shitty-looking facsimile of the Beacon (or Luxon or whatever the fuck it was) that he'd been playing keep-away with fucking-Lucien over: the next she was wandering in some weird dark forest that was unseasonably cold even before the rain that pissed down through the interwoven lattice of the branches above her.

The leaves crunched underneath her feet as she stomped through the undergrowth quietly, as only she was capable of, rubbing her arms to try and heat them up. Warmth was a comfort from the darkness of the forest. She was absolutely thankful that no one was here to see it though. Particularly Yasha and Jester.

She crossed a small clearing and saw a burnt-out hollow house that had been reclaimed by the nature of Nature and age. Only the threshold really stood, with the sunken stone supports leaning heavily on the thin scorched wood that it had been made of. Small swirling designs and thin marks cluttered the wood up to about her neck, but it didn't seem to be actively a trap. Nevertheless, the place had an eerie quiet that she associated with crypts and long past battle-fields and tunnels that led into the underdark—haunted, heavy, and full of anguish. Her pantlegs brushed against the side of the small amount of debris in front of where the door might have been and Beau resisted the instinct to shudder. Something horrible happened here and she was selfishly glad that Caleb wasn't with her, as much as she would have liked to have someone at her back and to be able to help with the small inscriptions on the doorframe.

It would have been too close, probably. She didn't want to stay here long as it was, let alone with a traumatized wizard over her shoulder.

Beau squinted against the darkness even with her goggles and could see a small amount of light filtering through the trees ahead where they seemed to thin. Thank God.

Hopefully, it was an inn and nothing that was going to kill her slowly and painfully. Her feet hurt. She reached the clearing and the light came from a little cottage.

Loam drifted up the sides of it as if it had popped out of the ground and the thatched roof somehow looked rather dry and unassuming in a forest where everything had been absolutely awful and she didn't even have friends to bitch at good-naturedly about it.

But still, it was a rather strange little cottage with windows the size of the entire front facade next to a door that looked as if it were simultaneously solid and easily breakable out of its frame. Light escaped in merry flickers of a hearth and onto the small front garden that held an odd assortment of both wilted flowers and harvested plants slowly dying in the days after Harvest Close—had that only been last week? Whatever the case, the clearing looked like some weird fairytale version of a witches house—one that would occasionally bless as often as they cursed those poor saps who got caught in their weird machinations. All sorts of alarm bells rang in her head, which reminded her softly of Ishnari and her hut that had been much more dilapidated than this one though this had it matched in sheer eerie-ness, as she walked toward the front gate and had just decided to sneak around it when a voice echoed from out of the door.

It was... Far too normal, the pottage and the small walk to the door that seemed to tumble like rocks out of it before coming to a halt at flowering hedges that definitely shouldn't be flowering at this time of the year.

“Hallo?” Beau ducked behind one of the hedges and watched as the strange door swung open by itself and a small cat's face peeked out from the semidarkness of the house before disappearing back into it with a humph and the click of the door. “Was war das, kleine Katzchen? War es etwas?”

The voice was soft and there was something familiar about the way that the cadence of the words danced on the air, but Beau could not understand why. It sounded like Zemnian, and she was certain that Caleb would know what the voice had said, but even more than that it sounded familiar—like warmth and comfort.

It made her especially less likely to trust it, but now she needed to know who the hell lived in this house in the middle of the forest and what they were doing here. Beau leaned forward slightly as she tried to get her feet underneath her as she went to get to her feet and go around the back and the painted white fence crumbled under her and left her sprawling over the hedge and into a puddle of mud that splashed loudly as the splintered wood clattered to the ground.

A loud alarm began to sound off into the woods. Piercing and lonely like the howl of wolves, it echoed with screams of desolation and of broken things. Like the voices of the damned. Before she had time to do anything, the door swung wide and a figure black lit in the firelight emerged from the cottage.

“Wer sind sie?! Komm und starb mich, Schweinehunde,” It yelled and the twang of a crossbow issued into the rain-splattered night. The bolt landed about an inch from her left toe and Beau scrambled up into a half-assed stance to protect herself as the figure continued to yell. “Komm und starb mich, fickers! Komm auf dem Probe stellen! I'm ready for you. Nimmt Sie meine Familie und meine Heim von mich, aber ich keine Angst auf Vernichtung habe und du es wieder nimmt werden!”

A second bolt whizzed past her undercut too quickly for her to snatch it out of the air and embedded itself somewhere in the fence. Beau began to run toward the figure and cursed the fact that she decided to learn Undercommon over a language that someone in her... family she guessed... spoke, though she could get the relative gist.

 _Who are you? Come and kill me..._ She wasn't certain of the next word but it followed that it was either something poetic or something resembling a cuss-word that she would absolutely have to wheedle out of Caleb what it meant (after all, she had to know what cussing sounded like in all of the languages she was familiar with or what was the point of anything). _Come and kill me, fuckers!_ (She remembered that one.) _Come, try it! You took my family and my home from me, but I have no fear of annihilation and you will not take it again._

She ran toward the house, the mud sucking on her feet but providing no resistance as she ran. “Look, I'm not trying to kill you... Shit, how do you say that in Zemnian? ik verd nicht starbt dick?”

“Fick dich.”

“Fuck you, too!” She ran forward and her fist began to fly in the figure's general direction, one that—now she was closer—looked like an old woman. There was a moment as the fist went toward the woman's head and collided with something invisible that hit her knuckles just right that there was an almighty crack as three of her knuckles broke on the mage armor.

“Shit.” She struck out with both of her legs as the woman ducked and stumbled back out of range as she wound the crossbow tight again.

“Wer der Fick sind Sie?”

“Someone trying to get out of the fucking rain.” The woman's hands began to move in a combination that Beau recognized as a hold person spell.

She had two choices, resist it or let it take hold. On one hand, it meant that her only way of protecting herself was gone. On the other--and this was echoed by the strange echoes of both Caduceus and Fjord, which was bizarre (note: research whether voices that sounded like her friends was a bad thing in the scheme of things, just to make sure)--the old lady looked frightened out of her mind and like she might have the ability to listen to what was going on. And had fucking magic, which could mean that Beau could get home that much quicker. 

With the same amount of restraint as on Darktow, she let it.She breathed as the spell sent tingling off into her body like she'd just been hit with a stunning strike as the mud underneath her feet hardened and she stood still.

The woman glared at her as she moved deeper into the firelight that seemed to light her hair into slightly familiar shades of red. Beau idly wondered whether all Zemnians were red-headed before she distinctly remembered that neither Astrid nor Eodwulf had been.

“Sprechen Sie Zemnian?”

“Nein, but I have a friend who does. I can understand some of it.” The woman cocked her head as something brushed past Beau's heels with an aggrieved yowl that could only be a cat and jumped up onto the woman's shoulder. It's eyes glowed in a familiar, hah, way to Frumpkin's when Caleb sent him off to see something. “Dude, I'm right in front of you... I get wanting to be magical and mystical or whatever, but you don't need to pretend that you can't see me without your cat.”

“Mein... My common is not good... But no I cannot see you without him. How did you know about my cat?”

"It's a familiar, right?" There was the sound of a string going slack as something hit the ground next to her foot. A small crossbow bolt sunk into the space next to her toe.

“I'm a fucking expositor okay. It's my job to know shit.”

“Ah... Und... What would 'a fucking Expositor' be doing in these woods?” The woman's hand brushed down over the crossbow again.

“You are real good at being ominous lady, even if...” There were two shots in quick succession toward her feet that made her jump over them, or would have had the wizard in front of her not cast hold person. The bolts joined the first and tickled the sides of each of her boots.

“Sagen sie etwas?”

“I got sucked into a magical thingamagig that shat me out here. Honestly, you're the first person I've seen in a couple of hours, so I don't have any fucking clue where I am.”

The woman's eyes narrowed as she brushed a segment of her hair out of her eyes, calculating.“Du bist in der Wald um Blumenthal.” _You are in the woods around Blumenthal._

“Shit.”

The woman's head tilted again, the familiar's glare deepening as the woman slowly lowered the Crossbow and set it down on a rickety table in front of the fire. Beau felt hold-person fade as the woman extended her hand toward a seat in front of the fire that was blazing happily even in the rain.

“Come, Come. It's cold outside and the hearth is warm.”

“Uh, what?”

“Come... dry yourself by the fire. And then you can tell me your name and why you know Blumenthal.”


	3. Chapter two: Uncomfortable Similarities

Beau walked cautiously over the hard packed earth of the floor and deposited herself as carelessly in the chair as she possibly could. She already hadn't made a good impression on this woman and probably should have sat down properly, but something petty that she probably should have left behind as she'd grown with the others didn't want to give the woman the satisfaction. The woman's eyebrow arched in a way that reminded her particularly of early-Caleb's grumpy glare as she surveyed the room.(She absolutely needed to stop making those comparisons even if the cast of her nose and the way that her face was shaped lent to the comparison, there was absolutely no way that they were related. It would be weird.)  
It was small and cozy. Pots hung from the ceiling with the drying withered leaves of various plants that she honestly wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of. The rickety table that looked as if there were charred marks at the bottom—a small asshole part of her uncharitably suggested that it had been smuggled out of the house she'd seen earlier—and littered with bits of fabric half-way constructed into bags that she recognized vaguely as poultice bags and half-carved wooden bobbles looked as if it hadn't been used to host visitors in a long time.  
The hearth was easily the center of the entire house and looked a little like the fireplaces that Caleb had put in the tower, with the small accents of carved wood with jars upon jars of little glass gobules and small rocks that decorated the mantle. A jar that looked much older than the rest held a collection of small pins and medals and buttons that easily could have been found in Veth's pockets stood in the middle of the mantle piece in a place of distinction that was almost impossible to miss.  
“They... they were my husband's,” the soft voice dragged her back to look at the woman. Her face was thin and gaunt with wrinkled crows feet scoring the corners of her eyes like she'd once had things that would make her laugh, but now she looked... Well, tired. Red hair streaked with white and gray tumbled down one side of her face and a small mask of pocked scarring around her eyes that, now Beau looked, were pale and sightless as Shakaste's. The woman's Familiar hopped up into her lap and gave a small circuit of the space before settling itself between her long fingers that patted the cat rhythmically as she continued to speak. “He died... A long time ago and I keep picking up things that remind me of him and the things he would collect. Sometimes, I leave them where he was buried.”  
“It's... It's good that you remember him.”  
“Ja.”  
Silence but for the crackling of the fire as she pet the cat. It was smaller than Frumpkin and looked a lot more like a young tabby cat with splotches of red and black on his face and on his ears. He looked soft.  
“Beau.”  
“Entshuldigung?”  
“My name is Beau.”  
“Ah... Una.”  
“Una?”  
“Meine Name. Ich heisse Una Ermendrud.”  
Beau came back from the comfort of the fire as her brain began to move rapidly and she sat up with a jolt. Una flinched and tried to make herself smaller in the chair as Beau leapt up from her own. There was no way that this woman could be Caleb's... mother? Had to be even if she looked much younger than she probably should if she was Caleb's mom, though how old was Caleb really?  
“You know my name? Why do you know my name?”  
“Uh... Might know your son actually.”  
“My son is dead. Died the same night as my husband.”  
“Tall fucker? Likes cats, books, and for some reason putting his hands in fucking bread?” Beau's mind was running faster than she could stop the flow of information coming out of her mouth. “Red hair and blue eyes. Counts all of his gold one by one to the consternation of every shopkeeper who's ever met him. Clever as hell.” If this was his mom, then where the fuck was she? Caleb said he'd killed all of his family. Was she in some sort of alternate reality shit thing that made her meet her friend's, her brother's, mother and she no longer existed? Did Caleb no longer exist? What about Fjord, and Yasha, and Jester, and Veth, and Cad? Was there some sort of alternate reality her running around?  
“What the fuck did that gem do? He was holding it for a solid minute and it went like the Beacon did,” Beau was pacing now, “Weird and kinda glowy toward his chest but it was like weirdly purple or something before I tackled him? So what if it did do something... like a shitty backwards Beacon thing? Fuck... What if I accidentally went back in time to meet his mom? No. Doesn't make sense... The timelines don't match up, not unless I went back to before the fire thing... So if she's not lying and I've just met Caleb's mom...”  
“Expositor.”  
Beau looked up from the trench she was worrying into the floor with her pacing. “What?”  
“My son's name,” Una or whoever she was stood as her cat jumped to the floor. “was not Caleb and...”  
“I know, his name was Bren Al-something Ermendrud,” Beau waved the woman off before turning back to pacing, “It means that either I've gone into an alternate universe or timeline, or that he only thought that he....”  
There was a click as a crossbow bolt was loaded and pointed underneath her chin in a wavering set of hands.  
“Expositor Beau... You will explain yourself right now... or I will put this crossbow bolt in your neck... I will not miss.” There was a moment where her face was cast in the same resolve that reminded Beau of Caleb just outside of Shadycreek Run and talking to fuckin' Trent. Well, there was no doubt that the two of them were related now.  
“I told you, I know your son. He's...”  
There was the sound of a loud airhorn in her head as something echoed through her head.  
"BEEAUUU? Are. You. okay? You. Aren't. Dead. Or. Anything. Are. You? Where. Did. You. Go? There. Was. Like. A. Big. Fuckball. Of. Light. And. You. Were. Gone—"the ear splitting noise of Jester's sending interrupted her as she held up a finger toward Una in the universal signal of “Wait” before the airhorn sounded again,  
Fuckball is one word FJORD. Can. We. Get. To. You? Did. You. Land. In. A. Donut. Shop? Cay-leb. And. Essek. Think. That. It. Was. Teleportation—"  
“Yeah, Jessie, I'm fine. I landed in Blumenthal. No donut shop. Uh... Does he think that it did some dunamagic shit?”  
"Essek. Said. That. It. Didn't. Probably. And. We. Are. On, Our. Way. I'm. Gonna. Scry. on. You. Do.be.dobe do."  
“That's probably not good.”  
“I believe... I made myself clear. Explain yourself.”  
“I know your son. He survived... relatively speaking the night that your husband died and spent a long time alone trying to heal from it and run from the man whose responsible. 50/50 on the day who he thinks that is.” Beau began to watch the crossbow again and calculated how long, probably, it would take for her to take it out of the wizard's hands. Too long if she was anything as quick as Veth... It would be a toss-up.  
“Wie kennt ihm? Huh? How you know him?” Panic started to issue into her voice and her shaking fingers pressed the trigger. The crossbow fired right into the direction of her neck and Beau caught it out of the air and dropped it with a clatter onto the hard packed earth.  
“He's my... friend? It's hard to explain. We travel together as adventurers—there are a bunch of us doing dumb shit and then doing even dumber shit to fix the dumb shit and then doing even dumber shit to fix the dumb shit the first round of dumb shit was supposed to fix and... Well yeah. But he turned out to be a good wizard and a decent man. He's weird as shit, don't get me wrong. But we're actively trying to leave shit better than we found it,” Beau planted her feet in a way that felt much more like she was not as wrong-footed as she had been since the moment she'd landed in the middle of the forest. “He's like my brother. And...”  
There was a whoosh of light and sound on the threshold and Una turned toward the source of the noise, crossbow still drawn, as the Mighty Nein and fuckin-Essek teleported into the house of one Una Ermendrud.


End file.
